


Zing Zap Zoom

by JustAnotherGhostwriter



Series: NaNo Meets Whumptober [1]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Bad Things Happen Bingo Prompt: Accidentally Hurt By A Friend, Canon Disabled Character, Dyslexia, Gen, Whumptober Prompt: Shaking Hands, dysgraphia, too much caffeine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-16 18:42:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21275906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAnotherGhostwriter/pseuds/JustAnotherGhostwriter
Summary: Wylan's laptop and backup external drive both get into an accident nine hours before his very important final paper is due. Kaz takes the challenge up as just another particularly difficult job, and comes up with a plan that's as ill-advised and effective as most of Kaz Brekker's plans usually are.





	Zing Zap Zoom

**Author's Note:**

> I read Aia’s [anecdote on Tumblr](https://appropriately-inappropriate.tumblr.com/post/99019808740/rukafais-graveyardhorse-korrakun-my) a few months ago, and I couldn’t see anything except a SoC college AU in the hilarious madness narrated in that post. I now finally have the time and the excuse to actually write the fic, even though I’ll freely admit that I’m stretching both prompts a lottle to fit this one. Can we call it creative licence? 
> 
> Also, yay for this NaNo project ‘forcing’ me to write for fandoms I’ve never written for (off anonymous) before! This is dedicated, with love, to all those taking part in the Grisha Big Bang. You’re all rockstars, and I can’t wait to bask in the glory of all that’s produced by your passion for this universe. 
> 
> Warnings: Wylan is sometimes unjustly unkind to himself when he thinks or talks about his learning disabilities. And Kaz uses an abelistic slur against himself, too. Also very vague mentions that Jan Van Eck is a terrible father.

Matthias was the first to call it the Demjin Den, but even before they could all latch on to a common, heartfelt title for the place, the rest of the house mates had always viewed Kaz’s attic as out of bounds. Most of that view had been bred from the fact that Kaz was, objectively, pretty terrifying in all ways from his deathstare and shark-grin to the fact that the whole campus, including the administration, _knew _that he frequently hacked their systems but had yet to find a way to pin him to the act. Even Jesper, who had known and stayed with Kaz the longest, was still openly wary of the man’s potential to cause destruction. And, of course, the fact that Kaz, verbally and with very overt and often violent action, discouraged people from being in his personal space also added to the assumption that Kaz’s attic was a no-go zone.

Wylan, the second to last person to join the rundown student accommodation known to all on campus as the Slat, didn’t understand why the person with the most difficulty with the flight of stairs and ladder-like stairs would willingly choose to traverse both on multiple occasions on a daily basis. He did, however, keep his thoughts to himself, wise enough – scared enough – to know that poking around in something that was very clearly Not Talked About in the Slat would very likely get him kicked out. And, given that the house had been the very last place available to him due to his incredibly late (and handsomely paid for, no doubt) acceptance into the university, he simply couldn’t afford to even _want _to live elsewhere. Luckily, he thought at first, he was good at finding joy in the cracks of a house he didn’t particularly want to live in. That grim-determined feeling, surprisingly, faded rather quickly as he got to know the people behind their admittedly strange first impressions. Inej, who seemed to know almost as much as Kaz about all things, was particularly helpful, often quietly giving him answers when she found him feeling a bit too adrift to keep the confusion from his face, and her intel was enough for him to actually assimilate into the odd collection of people who lived in the house.

Surviving the university was an entirely different manner. He’d _known _it would be hard, but he’d hyped himself up by researching successful university graduates who also had dyslexia and dysgraphia in various combinations, and figured that if they could do it, even though most of them were from disadvantaged backgrounds, then his silver-spoon ass could certainly scrape through as well. Determination proved just shy of what he needed to actually turn the dream into a reality, and it only took about three weeks of classes for his jittery nerves to turn to full-blown panic. The household, much to his amazement, had rallied to help him in different ways – Nina, with her mothering nature and encouragement and great cooking; Inej with her infinite patience and often creepy levels of knowledge to help him along; Jesper, with his suspiciously-eager offers to read aloud or to simply stay up to keep Wylan company during late evenings. Even Matthias, who had very reluctantly moved in just after Wylan had so that he and Nina could share living costs more effectively, melted some of his icy exterior to help out where he could.

If Wylan hadn’t expected his new mixed bag of house mates to help out, then he _really _hadn’t expected Kaz to do anything, except maybe use Wylan’s obvious weakness to his advantage, as he did with most people. And, by most accounts, Kaz really _didn’t_ help– didn’t outright use it as a weapon, but by no means took pity on him like the others did, immune to Nina’s glaring when his jibes and inconsideration made Wylan red in the face and ashamed.

“It’s not Christmas, Nina, dear,” he snapped at her on one memorable occasion. “You can’t get the soulless cripple to give a damn.”

“That’s not even how the story – ” Nina ground out, but Kaz had already disappeared, leaving her to mime choking him.

But also... But also, Wylan found himself sitting in the Demjen Den, curled up on a comfortable, ancient armchair finishing his final essay, because downstairs was noisy, the first floor was little better and people’s attempts to help turned to hovering when they were stressed about their own final submissions and upcoming exams, meaning that he just _really _ needed space to himself where he could concentrate on this monster that was worth forty percent of his grade. He had no real recollection of being _invited _ up to the attic; couldn’t remember when the first time was that he’d set foot in there, or even when Kaz had started letting him into his sanctuary. Well. _Allowing _him in was a bit of a stretch – Kaz simply sat at his makeshift desk and pretended Wylan didn’t exist, and Wylan was always very careful not to make sudden movements or loud noises when he wasn’t zoned completely into his work.

Inej was rumoured to be allowed up, sometimes, but that was _only _ a rumour, because nobody in the Slat seemed to reliably be able to name a time they’d noticed her coming in or out a room – Inej seemed to simply _appear _ in their midst, like smoke. The only other creature who got more than the foot of the ladder-stairs was Matthias’ dog, Trassel, a half-wild mutt Jesper insisted gravely was half-wolf who took the ladder rungs as though they shouldn’t cause a dog of his size to pause. He had, to Matthias and Nina’s total shock and betrayal, taken a liking to Kaz within the first two weeks of his arrival. Matthias had accused Kaz of poison or some other trick, but Nina, who had been trying to win her boyfriend’s dog’s affection for _ages _without much victory, was upset enough to burn Kaz’s food for a few days, even when it wasn’t her turn to cook. Kaz had simply fixed Nina with his dead-eyed stare of daring as he slowly ate every burned morsel without a flinch, and Inej had intervened before it escalated any further.

Trass was there with them as Wylan furiously typed the last of his final essay, sleeping sprawled out on Kaz’s feet. Until he suddenly wasn’t. Some sound from outside startled Trass awake, made him lie with a cocked head for a moment, and then burst toward the exit with a bark. His tail smacked Wylan’s glass of water as he bounded past, and Wylan watched as the glass, seemingly in slow motion, tipped all over his already Trass-chewed laptop. He yowled, and tried desperately to save something, but there was an ominous popping and fizzing noise, and then the smell of something burning. Frantically, he patted at the mess with his shirt, but the laptop screen had gone blank, and there was an ominous smoke starting to rise from not only the laptop, but the external drive attached as well. He didn’t trust the cloud – had been drilled by his father since a young age that anybody could gain access to your information and use it nefariously if it was stored online – and so he backed everything up physically, diligent in doing so as his trust in his chewed laptop cord dwindled further every day. But, right then, his backup seemed to be going up in smoke. Literally.

Wylan had already been stressed. He was failing that class despite going to every lecture and struggling through taking notes and doing the readings. And he’d been working _so hard _on getting his brain to _work right _so he could research this paper and write out the notes and then plan a coherent, well-argued essay. It was due in nine hours, and he’d spent three hard weeks on it, and his final hope to pass this class was done for. So, staring at the smoking mess, Wylan burst into tears. Not the most mature response, perhaps, but the one that most conveyed the deep despair he’d been pretending to hold at bay for weeks.

Through the gusty mostly-sniffling, Wylan heard Kaz sigh, slap his hands to his desk and lever himself to his feet. Kaz limped over, slowly without his cane, while Wylan continued to simply sit, cradling his laptop in his arms as he hopelessly pressed the power button again and again. Kaz loomed ominously over Wylan’s shoulder for a moment, probably assessing the situation, and then limped a little further so he could reach the socket and turn the power off. A part of Wylan miserably wondered if electrocution was enough to get him an extension long enough that it would actually count for anything.

“Go and get a spare laptop from Storage,” Kaz told him, abruptly. “And then meet me in the kitchen.”

“It’s due in the _morning_,” Wylan whispered back, his voice cracking twice.

He didn’t see Kaz’s eyeroll, but could definitely imagine it in the short silence that followed. “Just do it, Wylan. I can’t fix this if you’re _completely _ incompetent_._”

Wylan was too numb and miserable to argue back, so he simply put his ruined laptop on the floor and slunk down the ladder-stairs before padding down the first-floor hallway towards Storage. Storage might have been a series of hall closets, once, or even a tiny storage room, but Kaz had turned it into one large space with shelves where he kept all of his work items, as he called them. Some of them were baffling. Most of them were almost certainly contraband in some way. Matthias had once asked Kaz why he didn’t keep them in the attic, instead, or at least under lock and key, and Kaz had looked him dead in the eye, one eyebrow raised, and asked whether he planned to attempt stealing from him. It was more of a deterrent than an entire Fort Knox security system, in Wylan’s opinion.

Enough of a deterrent, in fact, that Wylan _still_ hesitated before opening the doors to the usually ignored walk-in. There were no fewer than four laptops, and he simply grabbed the closest one, pushing aside a rolled-up large piece of heavy paper and three identical stuffed lions to get to it. Usually, he would have had to stop himself wondering where Kaz had procured the items and what they were all for, but right then he was too miserable to do more than half-heartedly try to shove one of the lions into a more secure position before he once again shut the door.

He found Kaz poking around the stove. That was a rare sight in and of itself; Nina was of the impression that if Kaz wasn’t handed already-edible food he’d simply not eat and finally fade away into the nothingness his body always seemed to be gearing towards. It was one of the reasons that the Slat divided chores based on skill and then approximate equality of labour; nobody wanted to have to suffer through atrocious cooking once a week. Wylan tried once again to explain that it was a hopeless task, but Kaz just dead-stared him, beginning to smash up white pills with the bottom of a glass rhythmically, until Wylan gave up. Almost automatically, he sought out the bottle of pills and studied the label until the words made sense. Caffeine pills. Jesper won that bet, then; he’d insisted Kaz didn’t survive off liquid caffeine alone, but that Matthias’ only half-joking suggestion of harder drugs was also not meticulous Kaz’s style.

“What are you... doing?”

As usual, Kaz didn’t directly answer the question. “You’ve already done all the research. And all the work. You just need to look at your research notes, remember how you put it all together, and then plop it down again,” he said, leaning against the counter as he set the filter coffee machine into motion.

“But I – it can’t just – Not everybody remembers things like you do, Kaz. In fact, _most _people don’t,” Wylan said, half-exasperatedly and half tremulously. “It’s already late. I’m already exhausted. I’m not going –”

“I’m _getting to that_,” Kaz snapped. “Have I _ever _needed you to tell me how to do a so-called impossible job correctly, Van Eck? Just go and see if that hard drive is still in some semblance of a working order.”

“I’m not a _job_,” Wylan muttered quietly, but found his external on the kitchen table and plugged it into Kaz’s spare laptop anyway.

It was fried. Completely unresponsive. Hope that Wylan didn’t even know he’d had cracked and, morbidly, he looked back at Kaz to deliver the death knell. The words got stuck in his throat, however, when he witnessed Kaz dump the pill powder into the pot on the stove before slowly pouring the filter coffee in as well, stirring as he went. It was more than a little ironic that he was the one studying chemistry – supposedly _good _at all the parts of it that didn’t require reading or writing – but he was reduced to slack-jawed incomprehension by Kaz’s strange, and increasingly foul-smelling, concoction.

It didn’t take too long for said awful smell to filter out of the kitchen and into the strange sitting room/front entrance/hallway combination in a strength that silenced Jesper and Nina’s boisterous attempts to de-stress after a day of hard work. They filtered into the kitchen, Matthias following on their heels, and Wylan had to explain what parts of the situation he understood to them. Jesper insisted on trying to get the external to work, while Nina insisted she could save Wylan’s laptop’s hard drive and marched off to get it to prove herself. They were very enthusiastic in their attempts, while Matthias lurked around giving largely unhelpful comments. Eventually, some combination of the noise and smell of the steeping mixture in the pot – which now contained instant coffee, teaspoons of Kaz’s strange Dutch filter coffee, more crushed caffeine pills and, Wylan suspected, an energy drink, amongst other things – brought Inej downstairs, as well, although she was more concerned by Kaz’s motions and lack of answers to her questions than she was about Wylan’s failed technology.

Finally, Kaz poured all of the contents in the pot into one of the huge mugs he favoured, and handed it to Wylan with the proclamation that it would help him with the ‘sleeping problem’ that would otherwise hinder him finishing the assignment by morning. Wylan figured he was dead either way – couldn’t keep his mind from miserably dwelling on images of him having to crawl back to his father in failure, and what Jan Van Eck would do to him afterwards – and so he grabbed the mug and chugged, while Nina and Jesper cried in concern and Matthias accused Kaz of attempted murder and Inej frowned heavily. It tasted _ferocious –_ a level of awful he had no words for – and he l earned _very _quickly that he had to filter coffee grounds with his teeth. Nina stopped him from downing the whole thing, and they were all scolding him and Kaz alike when it hit.

It felt like he wasn’t even himself any more. It felt like he had no self; all at once, his tastebuds stopped protesting and his stomach stopped churning and his emotions stopped... emoting. Everything faded away to inconsequential trickles at the sideline of his mind, even as everything became so sharply in focus he could probably have studied the intricacies of the cracked counter before him if he didn’t think that sitting still that long might cause him to combust. Wylan’s heart kicked a little in his chest. He felt fragile. And utterly freaking invincible. He raised his face to Kaz in awe.

Kaz pushed his spare laptop over and simply told him to write, already. And Wylan did. Without stopping, even though his hands soon started shaking so rapidly that he missed keys more often than he hit them. It was slightly harder to zone in and focus than it usually was, but he used his times of distraction to look up additional references he hadn’t written down in his original notes. When even that didn’t work, he got up to speed walk around, sometimes aimlessly, with his head still on his paper and the hundred other things demanding attention, sometimes pointedly to get a glass of water. In these times, he vaguely acknowledged that some of the others were still around him, but their faces dwindled in numbers as the clock ticked closer and closer to dawn. He was _almost _ sure he had a conversation with Kaz while Kaz was on his way _out _ at some awful early-late hour, but he wouldn’t swear to that in the court. He was more aware of Kaz coming back in, around the time everybody else woke up and came downstairs, but Kaz could just have easily have come from upstairs and not outside, and the important thing was not Brekker’s mysterious night-time habits or even everybody’s worried questions and discussions of his well-being over his head. Even _waffles _ weren’t important right then – all that mattered was the gloriously _complete, _ referenced, _longer-than-the-original _ final paper that he got to triumphantly place on... somebody’s... USB stick and _sprint _ with to the library to print. He got it into the box with ten minutes to spare, and practically _bounced _back home, beaming, on top of the world thanks to endorphins and the magical effects of Kaz’s wonder potion.

“Guys! Guys, I got it in! And I wasn’t even the latest one! Oh, man, the secretary was, like, hawking over that box like a... well. Hawk. Vulture! Actually, no, I stand by hawk, because hawks catch live prey, don’t they? And so she was gonna _swoop _in and catch any latecomers. Just _waiting _for the – are those leftover waffles?”

With an expression of bemusement, Jesper handed over the plate. The bemusement faded to more worry when it became apparent that Wylan’s hands were shaking too hard for him to reliably cut his breakfast, but even as Nina began to offer to cut it for him, Wylan simply dug in with his fingers with gusto. He thought everybody’s reactions were funny. Even _more humorous_ were the ways they reacted when a glass simply slipped right through his trembling fingers when he picked it up, although he _did _apologise and offer to sweep even as he giggled.

“_Nope_.” Jesper snagged him as he hummed across the kitchen to grab the broom. “You’re going to _bed_. You need sleep. Come on.”

Wylan’s protests that he was _so _ far from sleep he was practically an alarm clock only made Jesper look at him funny and help him take off his shoes when his hands proved useless at laces, too. But even though Wylan lay down obediently, he was quickly proved correct; his brain was more awake than he’d ever felt it in his _life_, and sleep would not come. So he got up and started aimlessly cleaning his room, attempting, at first, to be quiet so nobody would hear and come in and yell at him about not sleeping. But his mind kept skipping and hopping so much that he soon forgot _why _he needed to be silent, and he soon began talking himself through the tasks he was completing. Or half-completing. Starting, at the very least.

“Wylan.” He spun around to find Inej in his doorway, and only just stopped himself from commenting about her apparition powers. “Are you... talking to your blinds in _Suli_?”

“Yes,” he said, and then blinked a little in the silence that followed, wondering where her confusion lay and whether he could fit all his shoes into one of the shelves currently housing his shirts, so that he could pack away his suitcase where his shoes currently were to make space for –

“_Why _are you talking to your blinds in Suli?” Inej finally asked, tone careful.

“I mean, I figured they weren’t made here. What things are, these days? But I don’t know any other foreign languages other than the Suli you’ve started teaching me, so I thought I’d try that so long and try to make them feel a little bit more at home by hearing their native tongue. I know that helps in stressful situations.”

Inej inhaled and squinted at him. “I’m going to go and get Nina,” she said, decisively, and then muttered something that sounded like a threat on Kaz’s life that Wylan would have taken seriously if he didn’t understand at least _some _of the dynamic between Inej and Kaz by that point.

He was a _lot_ more concerned about Nina and Jesper’s rage toward Kaz later that night. Neither of them listened to his insistences that he was fine, despite his practically unusable hands and, apparently, too-fast pulse and twitchy nature. He even tried to explain that he had _ideas _and _motivation _for the extra-credit miniature reports that he’d never even considered because he’d thought he’d never be _able _to get near him, and wasn’t that just something to celebrate, everybody? Kaz finally sulked out dramatically with a few choice curses and lots of flair to get away from their joined displeasure, and Wylan let himself be fussed over, even though he also couldn’t sit in one place for more than five minutes without his skin crawling.

There was nothing to do except to keep him hydrated – with a plastic bottle with a sippy lid to ensure he didn’t spill or break anything, and that was too hilarious to him to even be demeaning – and, eventually, everybody succumbed to sleep except Wylan. He curled up with Kaz’s borrowed laptop set to the dimmest light possible in a corner of the living room and typed merrily away at some extra-credit assignments, losing track of time and self and even his body’s weird twitches and shakes. Kaz’s reappearance was so silent that Wylan didn’t even notice _that _ at first – would probably have missed it entirely if Kaz hadn’t switched on the downstairs bathroom light. Startled and pained by the sudden intrusion, Wylan was suitably distracted enough to stare until Kaz emerged again. And, as far gone in terms of mental cohesion that Wylan _knew _ on some level he was, even he couldn’t miss that something was _wrong_.

From his position in the strange multi-purpose room in the house, Wylan silently watched Kaz move from the bathroom to the stairs, limping more heavily than Wylan had ever seen him move even _without _ the cane he gripped tightly in his hand. Once at the banister, Kaz seemed to rest all his weight on the rail, dragging himself up step by step. The house was quiet enough that Wylan heard the two soft, cut-off grunts of pain that Kaz allowed escape. Eventually, after Wylan was sure he’d sat there frozen in horror for an age, Kaz managed to make it to the first floor. But just because his house mate was out of sight did not put him out of mind – everything Wylan had carefully told himself _not _to think about since he moved in suddenly rushed like racehorses to the front of his mind, clamouring to be heard. There was little cohesion, but the bits that stood out – Kaz awake with him the night before, and again now; Kaz with all that coffee and still with all those caffeine tablets; Kaz’s gait and those steep attic ladder-stairs; how nobody ever talked about how much they saw – made his heart clench in a way that had nothing to do with the caffeine still running through his system.

He was hardly done sorting through his jumbled worries when Kaz made a slow, incredibly painful-looking decent and then limped very painfully to the door, heading back out. Not once did he notice Wylan’s still presence in the corner, which was almost more alarming than the noises of pain that _must _have come from Kaz, but that Wylan couldn’t add together with Brekker in his head. And, as Wylan sat there and contemplated, the obvious conclusion came to mind: Kaz had helped him finish his essay on time. One good turn deserved another. He’d stage an intervention; break the silence and force Kaz to sleep more, rest more, take better care of himself. That was an excellent idea.

So Wylan abandoned the laptop carelessly on the seat beside him and went up to the Demjin Den to wait for Kaz, the ascent made curiously fun by having to grip the ladder-stairs with now-violently trembling hands. At first, he simply walked around the space, too keyed up with purpose to sit still. As he completed what must have been his twentieth circuit, the brilliant idea to check the bed hit him. Perhaps, he thought, logically, as he went to sit on it, the only bed Kaz managed to haul up there Saints-knew-how was so uncomfortable that _that _was why Kaz didn’t sleep. And he was just too stubborn to say anything about it. Wylan wriggled around on the mattress a bit, and then lay down and wriggled some more, finding it to be firm, but comfortable in its firmness. There was an extra pillow tossed carelessly near the end of the bed, and Wylan wondered, after a while, if Kaz propped it under his bad leg.

And that was the last coherent thought he remembered having.

The next coherent thought, which followed a half-coherent mash of _what_ ?, was _shit, I think I fell asleep_. He fumbled for his phone with hands that were steadier, but still not completely right, and checked the time. For the longest moment, what he saw on the screen did not compute with his head. And then there was a noise of paper somewhere to his right, and Wylan half-raised himself off the bed instinctively to look. Kaz was seated at his desk, shuffling through some typed pages. Kaz bathed in sunlight. Because it was late morning. Wylan had slept for close to twelve hours. In Kaz’s bed. The noises were because Kaz's hands were shaking so obviously Wylan could note their tremble even through the headrush and across the distance. And then Kaz’s eyes flashed to Wylan and the glare suddenly levered his way was absolute black death.

“Get,” Kaz said, voice incredibly dangerous, “out.”

Wylan fled without a word, nearly concussing himself as vertigo hit halfway down the stairs. His brain felt like it was running on a third of the speed it should, and he was also thirsty and vaguely just feeling _off_. So he headed for a shower and brushed his teeth – two actions guaranteed to make anybody feel more human – and then stumbled, still dazed and a little sore, downstairs.

“All the Saints and my Uncle Vernon,” Jesper exclaimed. “Wylan, where _have _you been?”

“We thought you’d wandered outside and gotten lost! Or hurt!” Nina scolded, looking angry and relieved at the same time. “Your phone was here, so we couldn’t get hold of you, we didn’t know where you’d go...”

“I’m... sorry. I just... crashed. I... slept.”

“_Where_?” Jesper asked, incredulously. “You weren’t in your room!”

He had enough wits about him to save his own life by _not _admitting where he’d fallen asleep; simply apologised profusely again and thanked everybody for their help and patience and mollified Nina by allowing her to heap breakfast on his plate. He very vehemently turned down the offer of even tea, however; the faint smell of coffee from the pot was enough to almost turn his stomach. As he scarfed down his meal and tried to turn his brain more online, he noticed Inej slipping out with a plate of food. She returned only a few minutes later without the plate, but with a pinched expression on her face.

And Wylan, staring at his own faintly trembling hands, couldn’t stop thinking about the way Kaz’s had shaken. Or the slightly fuzzy memories he had of Kaz dragging himself up the stairs earlier that morning. Or the fact that Kaz, pissed off as he was, hadn’t even attempted to turf Wylan from his bed physically. Inej was on dishes duty, so Wylan wolfed down the rest of his food painfully fast so he could gain a few moments with her.

“Kaz isn’t okay, is he?” There was no way to even attempt to preamble something like that. Inej just looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Last night.... This morning, I mean. Early. I saw him... he was...” He lowered his voice even more, as though spilling some dark secret. “He was _hurting_, Inej. And he still went out after that. And then I...” A blush rose, hot and fast. “I kind of... made it so that... he was unable to sleep in his bed... Unable to lie down and... that... made it worse? Didn’t it?”

She considered him for a moment. “It wasn’t only your fault, Wylan.”

“No. But I added to it.”

“Accidentally.”

“Still. I... want to do something. Not just because I feel guilty. But because...” Because... why? Because Kaz Brekker was a _friend_? How laughably, stupidly childish a notion _that _was.

“Is he worth it?” Inej said, as though seemingly reading his mind.

And Wylan was struck dumb by the question. First, because of the apparently cool cruelty to it – was that what his _father _ sounded like, making decisions about his life? _Is the defective son of mine even worth the effort_ ? And then, as the shock and hurt faded and he really looked at Inej, he heard the real question behind the question. Because Kaz Brekker was not an easy man to care about in any way, and embarking on such a quest would be detrimental, near-impossible, often more taxing than rewarding, possibly endless. Inej wasn’t asking a philosophical question – she was asking Wylan, as she’d probably asked herself, if she was going to care _anyway_.

Wylan couldn’t speak, so he simply nodded, once. Her face remained impassive, but she nodded back.

“I slipped painkillers into his food,” she confided, quietly. “That will do, for now.”

“For now,” Wylan echoed.

Inej nodded. “One step at a time, I guess. I haven’t... figured out how to tackle this, either.”

“Well. You’ve got me, now. And... I think... I think if we bring it up with the others...” Jesper and Kaz snarked like siblings. Nina loved nothing more than dragging Kaz, but she also added extra food to his plate and made an effort to pick up after herself so that he would not trip over her things. Matthias was good, deep down, and for all the ways he and Kaz butted heads... There was something _there_ between them all that kept this place from imploding like it probably should.

Inej’s smile turned crafty, and she mock-solemnly held out her hand for Wylan to shake, striking the deal. Wylan grasped it firmly, like he’d been taught, and his fingers barely trembled.


End file.
